About Pickle—
If we pickle a string which comes from an untrusted source, that’s fine right? There’s no way to format the string or anything such that it exploits any kind of vulnerability with pickle. Right?
If we pickle a string which comes from an untrusted source, that’s fine right? There’s no way to format the string or anything such that it exploits any kind of vulnerability with pickle. Right?
I don’t see any way this could be possible - in order to create a malicious pickle object you’d have to have your untrusted input somehow “break outside” of its string container before it even gets pickled.
But honestly, what’s the use-case for pickle that can’t be replaced with a safer string-based format like JSON?
- you need to serialise arbitrary objects - you both read and write only using Python - your transfer protocol handles binary data (as opposed to plain text) - you don't need the serialisation to be human-readable - you want to be able to handle any Python type - you don't want to write your own serialization rules
JSON is "safer" only if you have full control over deserialization.